A Vigilante Is Warning Admins of Open Databases Before They Get Hacked

If you leave a database open on the internet, someone will find it. Over the past few weeks, hackers have targeted thousands of publicly accessible servers running database software such as MongoDB and Hadoop, and held their data for ransom.

Now someone is apparently taking matters into their owns hands, helpfully alerting admins that their databases are vulnerable to attack.

“It looks like a friendly warning,” Victor Gevers, chairman of the non-profit GDI Foundation which discloses security issues to affected victims, told Motherboard in a Twitter message. Gevers has been tracking the malicious attacks since they began in December, and on Monday started following this rather strange twist.

What hackers would do is scan the internet for databases that require no authorization to log into; make a copy of and then delete all of the data, and then place a ransom note, demanding that the victim pay a fee in return for their files.

But the vigilante, whoever they may be, is creating an empty folder called “your_db_is_not_secure” in some open databases. So far, the message has been placed into 49 of the 2,641 open databases using the Cassandra software, Gevers told Motherboard.

It’s not clear how effective this approach will actually be at informing potential victims, however, considering that database administrators might not even notice the slight change.

Gevers recently wrote in a tweet that the GDI Foundation has been informing victims too via email, and another group of security experts tried sending emails en masse automatically to potential targets.

If the messages don’t get through to database owners, maybe the ransom notes will.